The court heard that the 35-year-old had found his wife dead on the afternoon of January 6.

Jarosz sobbed as he told the jury during the trial of the moment that he woke up after a nap at his home in Wilton to find his wife hanging in their locked bathroom.

He said: “I saw my wife hanging and I cut her off and I started to cuddle her and was already all bruised. I then put my wife on our bed and I folded her hands, I cuddled her for an awful long time and I cried and I screamed ‘Why did you do this, why this?’.”

He said that when he was driving the schoolgirl later that day he “had no plans whatsoever” of what he intended to do.

He added: “I can’t remember half of the things, I know I had teary eyes. I remember nothing else, I do not remember the accident, nothing.

“I couldn’t basically collect myself, to hold it all together after I had cut my wife off.

“I was just driving around in circles. My memory stops with the moment I cut my wife off.”

He said that he did not remember claims that he unclipped the girl’s seatbelt shortly before the crash or that he prevented her from leaving the car.

The court heard that Mrs Jarosz, who had completed a medicine degree before moving to the UK, had previously talked about taking her own life and made an earlier attempt to take his own life.

Kerry Maylin, prosecuting, told the court that the defendant had become “hysterical” after the “tragedy” of discovering his wife’s body.

Miss Maylin said that the schoolgirl was trapped in the front passenger seat and had to be freed by firefighters following the crash in which Jarosz’s car hit a van, driven by local worker Peter May, and a railway bridge.

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